Do Disney+ Original Series Need Longer Seasons?

 Hey everyone! How's it going? I'm getting by. The idea for this post came to me on Wednesday morning, after I watched the latest episode of Hawkeye. After watching the episode I decided to ask the question, do Disney+ Original Series need longer seasons? Because honestly the Disney+ shows, particularly the Star Wars and MCU shows have a really hard time with cramming too much material into a season of television when those seasons are between six and eight episodes only. What If...? and Star Wars: The Bad Batch aren't that big of an issue since What If...? is an anthology series and The Bad Batch had 16 episodes in it's first season but the live action shows all seem to have this problem. Especially compared to live action shows on other streaming platforms like Hulu and Netflix which typically have between ten and fifteen episodes per season. I'm only going to focus on the three shows that I've seen, or will be seeing, all the way through. Oh and there will be spoilers for season 2 of The Mandalorian, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and episode 5 of Hawkeye, so if you haven't seen any of these three shows then go do that before reading this post. Let's get into it.

The impetus for this entire post came from watching episode 5 of Hawkeye, entitled, "Ronin". In the episode I found that the storyline for Maya Lopez/Echo was pretty weak in favour of introducing Yelena Belova played by Florence Pugh. Maya's storyline was always a little bit on the weak side because they're setting her up for her own spin-off, but it wasn't all that noticeable because up to this point it was pretty evenly balanced with Clint and Kate's storylines. But, the finale, which airs next week, not only has to wrap up everyone's storylines in a satisfying way, but it's also introducing Vincent D'Onofrio's version of Wilson Fisk/the Kingpin from Daredevil, probably so he'll appear in the Echo spin-off. 

The thing is that Hawkeye is a six episode limited series, with no plans for a second season or any projects down the line for Clint Barton or even Kate Bishop at this point. So it has to wrap all of this up, except for Echo's stuff, because there won't be a chance to pick up any loose threads in the next season. Let's take a look at the other two examples that I want to talk about.

While season 2 of The Mandalorian was a continuation of the storyline introduced in the first season, season 2 also introduced things that either went nowhere or were left as loose ends for future shows like Ahsoka and The Book of Boba Fett to pick up later on down the line. Like Cobb Vanth for example. He appeared in the first episode of the season, but then didn't show up again. Same with Bo-Katan and the other Mandalorians, and Ahsoka. Mainly because, in my mind anyway, if you're going to introduce a character, or a group of characters, in a show you should be able to service them properly so that viewers will want to follow them. Especially if they're going to be starring in their own show later on down the line. Most of the first half of the second season was meandering and traveling from one place to another and nothing from season 1, like Moff Gideon and why he wanted Grogu so badly, even came back into play until like the fifth episode and even then Gideon didn't show up in person until episode 6, more than halfway through the season. So it took me out of the story a bit because the first five episodes were used to set characters up for spin-offs, which don't really interest me very much because I don't care about those characters. 

A good example of this is season 2 of Star Trek: Discovery. The season introduced us to three new characters, Captain Pike (Anson Mount), Commander Una Reilly/Number One (Rebecca Romijn), and Spock (Ethan Peck). Technically these were re-introductions since Pike had previously been played by Jeffrey Hunter in the original TOS pilot, "The Cage", and by Bruce Greenwood in Star Trek (2009) and Star Trek Into Darkness (2013), and Spock is one of the most iconic characters in fiction ever, while Number One was originally played by Majel Barrett in "The Cage". But Pike and Spock were used extremely well in this series without taking away from the central characters of Michael Burnham and Saru (everyone else is basically supporting or recurring cast on that show at this point). It was only after Mount's work as Pike was well received by fans did CBS/Paramount decide to create the Captain Pike spin-off, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. Even if they had had a spin-off in mind for Pike when they decided to include him in season 2 of Discovery, they still produced a satisfying wrap-up for those characters in case Strange New Worlds hadn't gotten greenlit, while giving us a satisfying wrap-up for the crew of the Discovery as well.

The Falcon and the Winter Soldier is more along the lines of Hawkeye because it's also a limited series, though the fourth Captain America movie is continuing Sam and Bucky's adventures using the threads left dangling at the end of the show. It also has six episodes with elements not wrapped up or rushed through because they tried to get through too much material in only six forty minute episodes. The question remains though. Do Disney+ Original Series, particularly the Marvel and Star Wars ones, need longer seasons?

I think the answer is yes. Both Marvel and Star Wars have a huge slate of shows and movies coming out in the next several years and the problem with the shows being interconnected the way they are, particularly the Marvel shows being connected to the movies, is that they spend so much time in the limited series introducing elements that are going to be in later movies and/or shows, which takes time away from story and character elements that should be focused on for the six episode shows. 

Now the only non-Marvel and non-Star Wars Disney+ Original Series I've seen is Monsters at Work, which is an animated series. But using this as an example, High School Musical: The Musical: The Series had ten episodes in it's first season and twelve episodes in it's second. So why don't Marvel and Star Wars shows have longer seasons, especially for shows like Loki that are getting multiple seasons? They start out strong, I mean the opening four episodes of Hawkeye were amazing, but introducing Yelena with two episodes left, with all the baggage of her storyline was kind of pointless. This is partly why I'm not interested in most of the shows and movies coming out post-Hawkeye. They aren't characters I know or care about, they get pretty convoluted at times (see my opinions on the various DC Comics based shows) and then you add in Marvel trying to make them cinematic by cramming in so much material into the show and it's get even more convoluted and confusing and becomes not fun anymore.

Now, Star Wars isn't as bad, but we've only had one live action Disney+ Original Series Star Wars show so far and the pacing was weird for the second season of that show, for the reasons I mentioned earlier in this post. And I fear it's only going to get worse with Kenobi, Ahsoka, and The Book of Boba Fett.

Strangely enough the Hulu Original Series that are on Disney+ here in Canada like Love, Victor and Only Murders in the Building have ten episodes per season for each show, and none of them have the same pacing issues of the Marvel and Star Wars shows. So in the end I think the Marvel shows, and the Star Wars shows to a lesser extent, either need to not try to cram so much into one season or have more shows with multiple seasons, or better yet make the seasons and limited series longer in terms of the number of episodes just to give the stories a bit more time to breathe.

I think that's all I wanted to say about this. I just found it interesting because this is a trend that I've been seeing with the Marvel and Star Wars live action Disney+ Original Series, and I don't know if they can change it at this point. Just because so many shows have to come out per year and at certain times of the year, they come out right after the other, so it's hard to schedule that block for more than ten weeks if you don't want to have shows overlapping, because that can be an issue too if there's too much from one franchise on at once.

That's it for me for today, but I will be back next week with some Christmas posts. I hoped to do them this week, but things conspired to keep me from feeling like working on blog stuff. So until then have a great weekend and I will talk to you all later. Take care.